Interest in space sparked locally
Sugar Land-raised astronaut comes home for training
Houston native Loral O’Hara, one of 12 astronauts in NASA’s 2017 class, is a rocket scientist. Seriously.
After growing up in Sugar Land and graduating from Fort Bend ISD’s Clements High School, she studied liquid rocket engines and combustion stability in graduate school after earning an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering.
Now, O’Hara, 34, has returned home for her two years of space flight training.
In a brief interview Tuesday morning before a news conference at Johnson Space Center with the other new astronauts, O’Hara discussed how her interest in space was nurtured early at Quail Valley Elementary School in Missouri City.
She interacted with NASA through field trips to Johnson Space Center. In second grade, she planted sunflower seeds that had flown on the Space Shuttle.
“That kind of sparked an early interest in space flight and I was always interested in exploration, just in general,” O’Hara said. “I’ve … focused my career on exploring Earth up until now
and now I’m getting into space flight.”
She encourages young people who aspire to become astronauts to pursue studies in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.
“Get interested in one of those. Figure out what your interest is in those fields and then pursue it,” she said. “I think the other part of that is finding something that you’re really excited in and that you’d be happy doing if you never became an astronaut. It’s that enthusiasm that’ll make you excel in that field and be a competitive applicant.”
In high school, O’Hara attended several public debriefings of space shuttle crews. She especially recalls the 1999 mission lead by the first female shuttle commander, Eileen Collins.
“I got to meet her, I got to meet the rest of the crew and that was really memorable,” she said.
After graduating from Clements in 2001, O’Hara received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Kansas in 2005. She went to work for a year and a half and in 2009 earned her master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue University.
O’Hara said astronaut training in Houston is a double-dose of happiness; a homecoming that allows her to fulfill professional and personal dreams. Her parents, sister, aunt, uncles and cousins reside in the area.
“It’s really great to be coming back to Houston. I haven’t lived here since high school,” she said. “It’s pretty special to be able to move back here and be close to my family and work here and live here.”
NASA’s 2017 class includes its 12 astronauts as well as two Canadians who have joined them for training. Group members’ professional backgrounds range from engineers and physicians to pilots and researchers.
O’Hara said their preparation over the next two years will have five modules: flight training, waterbased space walk training in the buoyancy lab, and Russian language lessons as well as instruction on robotics and space systems.
Just before noon Tuesday, the 14 astronauts-intraining participated in a live-broadcasted conversation with three colleagues on the International Space Station.
Dr. Jonny Kim, a physician in the 2017 astronaut class with experience as a Navy SEAL, asked about the view of Monday’s solar eclipse from the ISS.
“To see it from the opposite point of view, I think — to a person — it was much more impressive and larger in size and vibrant in color, in some ways, than we expected, so that was really neat,” said ISS astronaut Randy Bresnik, a Marine fighter pilot by trade.
“We’re getting shots from a different perspective than anybody else on the planet, off the planet on our satellites or any observatories were able to get and, hopefully, that was useful to you guys to build a shared experience of what it’s like from low Earth orbit.”
Peggy Whitson, NASA’s former chief astronaut who set a space-duration record in April by spending more than 534 cumulative days in flight over her career, responded to a question about when to pay special attention during training.
“Everybody needs to know how to fix things,” said Whitson. “You can’t be hesitant about taking something apart and putting it back together because that’s a lot of our job.”